


Blue and Gold

by theadventuresof



Category: Death Note, Death Note & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, M/M, barely lawlight, drunk heart-to-heart, short and sweet??, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 20:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7121620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theadventuresof/pseuds/theadventuresof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He means to ask how Matsuda is faring in the aftermath of Ukita’s death. “How old are you, Matsuda?” he practically shouts instead, mentally cursing himself. Matsuda, rightfully, is taken aback.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue and Gold

They’re all more than a little tipsy when the tiredness hits. In an unwanted moment of clarity L suddenly feels painfully, shockingly sober, and the whole of the case comes rushing at him like something palpable and hot and awful, but as the hotel counter swoops towards him and his cheek meets the cold marble he is just as drunk as he was before. It’s been a while since he’s done this, specifically relinquishing control of his mental faculties. Next to him, Matsuda slams a just-emptied shotglass down on the marble surface. L winces from the impact. Is it possible to be drunk and hungover at the same time? Mogi is playing the hotel piano across from the grand window. Tokyo is shimmering, perhaps a little more vigorously than it should be. It’s not raining, but it threatened to today. Soichiro left early; Aizawa took one drink and decided he had better head home as well. L imagines it: two policemen in civilian clothes, hailing a cab together, probably talking quietly and exchanging small words of comfort—one of them recovering from a near-fatal heart attack, the other in mourning for the death of his best friend...How do you even begin to comfort someone when you are just as miserable as they are, and for a completely different reason? Aizawa has a wife and daughter at home; L can’t even imagine the state of the Yagami family right now.

It has been four days since Ukita—well. L keeps imagining him walking through the penthouse door, smelling of stale tobacco and shaking dirty water from his umbrella all over the pristine carpet, probably complaining about useless callers on the tipline.  _ We are avenging him,  _ L tries to convince himself. _ Slowly. _ Today the police publicly refused to work alongside his killer.  _ Slowly,  _ L tells himself once more.

And—no,  _ no, _ he’s shaking again—he pulls his knees up to his chest and curls his toes around the rim of the barstool, trying to steady himself; instead he is instantly transported to four nights ago, when the whole task force nearly fell apart. Ukita is dead; Soichiro nearly so; Aizawa came dangerously close then, and certainly will again. He fears for Matsuda—his impatience will get him into trouble; it’s only a matter of time. Mogi will not always be around to keep everyone stable.

_ This case is going to kill us all. _

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Ryuzaki,” says Matsuda’s voice from quite far away. L watches him slowly slide into focus, and begrudgingly assembles his limbs into a half-upright position, propping his chin up on one hand.

It occurs to him that he probably shouldn’t voice the string of thoughts running through his mind right now. He fishes the maraschino cherry out of the bottom of his glass and pops it in his mouth, marveling at how red it looks in the overwhelming gold and blue of the hotel suite and the window. He probably shouldn’t tell Matsuda how much he cares for him, oh  _ god, _ and how he thinks Soichiro is perhaps the finest and noblest father anyone could ask for, and how, even though he has only known the rest of the policemen for—what is it—four months now?—he inexplicably feels as if he has just lost a brother.

L coughs, unnerved by these realizations. Whatever he’s been drinking, it must be very strong.

He means to ask how Matsuda is faring in the aftermath of Ukita’s death. “How old are you, Matsuda?” he practically shouts instead, mentally cursing himself. Matsuda, rightfully, is taken aback.

“I—twenty-six?” Matsuda stutters.

L raises an invisible eyebrow. “Is that a question?”

“Twenty-six, Ryuzaki!” he affirms, sitting up ramrod straight and knocking over a nearly-empty bottle. “Er, why do you ask?”

L, truthfully, does not know what possessed him to ask. He should know this information anyway—it was all in the file that he looked over at the beginning of the case, and once he reads something once, it stays in his mind forever. Except, apparently, after an evening of shots.

Matsuda is frowning now. “How old are you, then?” he says. “Thirty, or something? You’re a lot younger than I was expecting, to tell you the truth.”

L spits the knotted cherry stem into his empty glass. “I’m twenty-four,” he says, his face inexplicably burning vermillion. A curl of Matsuda’s hair has come rakishly askew, and he wants nothing more than to reach out and pat it down flat. This dim-witted...this  _ child _ is older than he is. 

“You mean,” Matsuda says, and now he’s laughing before he realizes what his face is doing, “You mean that I’m older than  _ the  _ great detective L? That’s—that’s crazy, I…”

He turns back to the marble countertop, at an apparent loss for words. All at once, several ideas seem to occur to him. “Wait, then,” he says. “How long have you been doing—” he gestures to the penthouse suite, the scattered papers on the coffee table in front of the window, the three different laptops open and running on the floor. “—this?”

“Quite a while,” L mutters, not wanting to get into any more history than he has to. Mogi is playing something that sounds uncomfortably close to a love song on the piano. It does not help the situation remotely.

“But then...you would have to be…” Matsuda gives up drunkenly counting on his fingers. “Very young,” is what he settles for, and L snorts. He isn’t wrong. “Why did you...you know? Why did you—decide to become L, anyway?”

“Well,” says L, giving him a slightly twisted grin. If his own Matsuda Theory is correct, then they have a lot more in common than he would personally like to admit. “Why did you decide to become a policeman?”

“Oh,” says Matsuda, a little helplessly,  _ “Oh.” _ At once, everything L has speculated is confirmed. He quickly refines the Matsuda Theory to fit the new data. Probably pressured into police work by perpetually disappointed parents, who groomed him his whole life to be the perfect son, and then cast him aside when he failed to live up to their imagined expectations...most likely sees Soichiro as a father figure now  _ (just like you do, _ points out a small voice in his head helpfully)... but Matsuda, he still has a strong sense of justice, despite his rashness—he has potential, he definitely has potential...

“What did you say?” Matsuda says. Oh. He had said it all aloud.

“I said, it looks like rain,” L says, then changes his mind, plowing ahead despite some distant, more sober part of himself shouting at him to stop. “I mean—Soichiro Yagami. You respect him, but there’s something more. He’s like a father to you, possibly because your own father has rarely considered your best interests and tended to ignore you until he needed you for his own benefit...who is supporting you financially, then? I imagine he paid for your schooling, but cut off all monetary ties once you displayed no outward talents for police work—but you  _ are _ an important member of the task force, Matsuda; we need someone impulsive like you to move the case along, and I certainly don’t want you to die…that is, I don’t want any of us to die.” Oh, fuck, he can’t stop. “Tell me, are you jealous of the Chief’s son? Perhaps with the right support you could have turned out more like Light Yagami; it must pain you to see him doing so well in university—”

Matsuda is staring at him as if he’s on fire, but he can’t seem to control his own mouth anymore, and instead hears the words pouring from him in a babbling fountain of guesswork and conjecture. He imagines punching his drunken self in the neck. That would certainly shut him up.

Matsuda’s face contorts into something close to anger, and L flinches, half expecting him to hurl the empty shotglass at his face; instead, Matsuda sighs, and slumps down in his chair, and gives a weak little shrug before putting his head in his arms.

“I suppose you are the greatest detective in the world,” he says. “Even if you can’t hold your liquor worth a damn. I still can’t believe you’re only twenty-four,” he finishes, his voice wavering, and his shoulders are shaking and there are tears in his eyes and he’s laughing and crying and blushing and sobbing all at once; then without exactly meaning to L leans on him and finds him extraordinarily warm and prays in every language he knows that Matsuda survives the Kira case. 

“Ryuzaki?” Matsuda says. L makes a vague noise in his throat. “I have sort of a—a huge crush on you, like a big one, and sorry if it was really obvious—”

L groans and straightens up again, silently updating the Matsuda Theory to include this new information. 

“—and I understand if you’re not interested, because, like, why would you be, you know...but I just thought I’d—put that out there. That I like you. A lot.”

_ Shit. _

“Oh,” L says, his mouth suddenly very dry. “I’m actually seeing someone.”

“Yes. Okay,” Matsuda says, much too quickly. “That’s good, that’s...that’s fine. I’m sure it’s...that’s good. I—” 

He’s going through his pockets now, and he comes up with a pack of cigarettes. He offers one up like an olive branch. L accepts. 

“I owed Ukita a pack,” says Matsuda, with a tiny shrug. “Never got to give it to him.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> SORRY THIS ISN'T LAUGHTER IN THE DARK LMAO (incidentally i am nearly done with the next chapter of that, stay tuned)


End file.
